“ONE OF THE best things about mathematics, and part of what makes it like poetry, is that it opens new spaces for her. New spaces inside her. Abstract spaces. Spaces in higher dimensions. Infinite-dimensional spaces. Spaces where it is not necessarily possible to measure sizes and distances in the usual way. Before she started studying mathematics, she considered it a given that it is always possible to measure the distance between two points. But now she knows that this is only possible when one is in what mathematicians call metric spaces—spaces in which there is a distance measurement, what mathematicians call a metric.
Is there a human metric? Can a person be measured using letters and numbers?”